Intel Optane SSD 800p Review

Comparing these drives to the previous generation storage accelerators, the Optane 800p offers insanely fast everyday performance, in an actual, useable way. Drives from other manufacturers offer huge read and write numbers but very few programs will ever reach anywhere near those quoted numbers outside of benchmarking software. The Optane 800p hammered the competition in IOPS tests, such as Anvil’s 4K QD4 IOPS tests. In PCMark8, the Intel’s bandwidth result was only narrowly beaten by a Samsung 950 PRO RAID0 NVMe setup.

The capacities of 58GB and 118GB are a huge improvement over the 16GB and 32GB, but they’re still not really enough for any AAA title games, even without an OS installed. However, if you plan to use this drive in a laptop or desktop PC primarily for Windows 10, Office and some other productivity applications, the size and random access speeds will certainly boost your workflow.

The price for the drives is certainly of concern, arriving at around £140 and £90 for the 118GB and 58GB respectively. Certainly, it’s possible to get much more capacity for the same cost, but you won’t receive the same levels of real-world useable performance as you would from the Intel 800p.

We’ve yet to mention any kind of endurance figures – Intel claims the drive can live with 200GB/day for 5 years; that’s 1.7 drive writes a day for the 118GB or 3.5 for the 58GB – more than you’re ever likely to use.

All in all, we’re incredibly impressed by the speed of Intel’s 3D X-Point memory, especially in terms of actual usability in daily tasks.

If your use case fits the bill and you require a rapid storage drive for devices such as a work laptop or media PC with masses of spinning storage, the Intel will speed up your everyday tasks, without doubt.